All locks in a house are unlocked at birthing to ensure an easy delivery.

Scatter Solomon’s seal on the floor to banish serpents and venomous creatures from the room.

To protect your house from lightning, gather hazel tree branches on Palm Sunday and keep them in water.

Add caraway seeds to chicken feed to keep poultry from wandering.

Feed the seeds to homing pigeons to help them find their way back.

Stuff fennel in your keyhole or hang it over your door to protect against witches.

Never carry a hoe into the house. If you do so by mistake, carry it out again, walking backward to avoid bad luck. Never walk under a ladder, which is Satan’s territory. If you must do it, cross your fingers or make the sign of the fig (closed fist, with thumb between index and middle fingers).

If you give a steel blade to a friend, make the recipient pay you a penny to avoid cutting the friendship.

Never give a knife as a housewarming present, or your new neighbor will become an enemy.

Never pound a nail after sundown, or you will wake the tree gods.

Nail an evergreen branch to new rafters to bring good luck.

An empty hornets’ nest, hung high, also will bring good luck to any age house.

When you move to a new house, always enter first with a loaf of bread and a new broom.

Hair at no age must be cut at the waning of the moon, which would prevent it growing luxuriantly.

Hair cut off should always be burned; it unlucky to throw shorn hair away; otherwise, birds might make a nest of your hair, weaving tightly, so that you would have difficulty rising on your last day.

Choosing to cut your hair (or nails) on a particular day means the following: Cut them on Monday, you cut them for health; cut them on Tuesday, you cut them for wealth; cut them on Wednesday, you cut them for news; cut them on Thursday, a new pair of shoes; cut them on Friday, you cut them for sorrow; cut them on Saturday, see your true love tomorrow; cut them on Sunday, the devil will be with you all the week.

A bird in the house is a sign of a death. If a robin flies into a room through a window, death will shortly follow. Light candles on the night after November 1. One for each deceased relative should be placed in the window in the room where death occurred.

You must hold your breath while going past a cemetery or you will breathe in the spirit of someone who has recently died.

If a clock which has not been working suddenly chimes, there will be a death in the family.

Arnold Paoli (or Arnold Kol Paola) was an Austrian soldier who died in 1727 in the village Medvegia (now Serbia), falling from a wagon of hay. It should be back from the dead as a vampire.

During his lifetime, Arnold Paoli stated that a vampire killed during a war waged between the Austrian Empire and the Ottoman Empire and was convinced that bears a curse. A month after his death, he was seen roam around the village and would drink the blood of almost half the population.

Paola and all his alleged victims were exhumed and pierced with one cleat. When he opened the coffin, the body was intact and lips covered with blood. He pulled out a terrible scream when the stake was planted in his heart!
This story and many similar cases have triggered a massive return of belief in vampires in Europe. But “waves” of vampirism epidemics were caused by the current at that time. The large number of cases of vampirism allegedly led many authorities to carry out investigations and prosecutions.
The investigation in the case of Paola and other vampires in Serbia were led by the Imperial War Council in Vienna that Serbia was then an Austrian province. In the minutes drawn up in Belgrade in 1732, the word “vampire” is mentioned officially for the first time.
Arnold Paoli case is linked to that of Petar Blagojevic, another vampire who would be shown two years earlier (1725) in the village Kisilova, almost Medvegia. Both cases have become extremely popular in Western Europe.

Magic practitioners and witches are commonly consulted in that country for spells to deal with money and inheritance issues. Many witches cast spells or curses over adulterers and other cheaters. Arcane supernatural cures are sought out for infertility and common health problems.

Many people attach great importance to things or events of their existence they were made or which have often heard people talking that might bring unhappiness or bad luck.

History is full of examples and strange happenings. Here are some reasons to reflect on some things that you abstain:

When the 13th day of the month is a Friday
Putting on new clothes on a Friday
Thirteen people around a table
Place the bread on the table upside down
Pour salt on the table
Meeting with a creature at night including people cats and dogs and ghosts
Pass under a standing ladder
Giving Chrysanthemums or carnations
Placing a hat on a bed or wearing it indoors
Opening an umbrella indoors
A break a mirror = 7 years of bad luck A quote from practitioner Silver Ravenwolf. “The major misconception about Witchcraft today is that Witches worship Satan, which is just not so. We do not believe in Satan. That is a Christian creation. We don’t worship evil. Indeed, to give evil a name is not a real intelligent thing to do, because then you give it power.”

Also here with a radio show chatting about all sorts of myths click here to access it

If you are old enough to remember watching the old TV show, Unsolved Mysteries, you know how exasperating it was to watch the various stories that explained what happened.

When weird things happen, we want to know why. While we continue the trend of not providing answers, here are 3 unsolved mysteries around the world.

Taos Hum

The Taos Hum is an elusive low-frequency humming noise heard in Taos New Mexico! But its source remains a mystery

The Taos Hum may be best described with the following attributes:

First, the hum is selective. Only a small percentage of Taos residents perceive it.

Second, the hum is persistent since most hearers perceive it on a weekly basis.

Third, the source of the hum must be widespread since hearers perceive it throughout the Taos area. Moreover, all the country describes a similar phenomenon.

Fourth, the hum is invariably described as low in frequency and reminiscent of a distant pump, an idling diesel truck, or perhaps someone’s high powered audio bass running amok.

The research revealed, however, that there was not a single identifiable Taos Hum but instead several different ones that people reported; some describe it as whir, hum or buzz. The fact that not everyone heard the same thing was puzzling, and suggests that they may have been reporting subjective experiences instead of objective sounds.

Neurologist Oliver Sacks, for example, has written extensively on both visual and auditory hallucinations in his books “Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain” (2007) and “Hallucinations” (2012). Some of the Taos Hum hearers have even reported hearing it after they have moved out of the area.

It all began in 1988 when the CIA Fine Arts Commission commissioned local artist James Sanborn to create a cryptographic sculpture for a courtyard on the CIA campus. Sanborn completed the two-part sculpture in 1990, which included stones laid out in International Morse code near the front entrance of the CIA campus, and a 12-foot-high, verdigrised copper, granite and petrified wood sculpture. The latter, which is the more famous part of Kryptos, was inscribed with four encrypted messages composed from some 1,800 letters carved out of the copper plate.

One of the memos notes that the layout of the two-part sculpture was “a landscaping scheme designed to recall the natural stone out-cropping that existed on the site before the Agency, and that will endure as do mountains.” The placement of the sculpture “in a geologic context reinforces the text’s ‘hidden-ness’ as if it were a fossil or an image frozen in time.”

Working from the transcription obtained by interns a year earlier, they quickly determined, using computer diagnostic tools, that the sculpture consisted of four parts — using at least three different ciphers — and a cryptographic table based on an encryption method developed in the 16th century by a Frenchman named Blaise de Vigenere that was key to helping them solve parts of the puzzle.

The first part of the sculpture used a periodic polyalphabetic substitution cipher using 10 alphabets, and when decrypted was a poetic phrase that Sanborn had composed himself: “Between subtle shading and the absence of light lies the nuance of iqlusion” (“iqlusion” was an intentional misspelling of illusion).

Part two used a periodic polyalphabetic substitution cipher using 8 alphabets. When decrypted, the passage hinted at something buried:

It was totally invisible. How’s that possible? They used the Earth’s magnetic field. x The information was gathered and transmitted underground to an unknown location. x Does Langley know about this? They should: It’s buried out there somewhere. x Who knows the exact location? Only WW. This was his last message. x Thirty-eight degrees fifty-seven minutes six point five seconds north, seventy-seven degrees eight minutes forty-four seconds west. ID by rows.

Part three used a keyed columnar transposition cipher, which the cryptanalysts partly diagnosed solely by “eyeballing” the text.

When decrypted, it was a paraphrased page taken from the diary of archaeologist Howard Carter describing the opening of a door in King Tut’s tomb on Nov. 26, 1922.
Slowly, desperately slowly, the remains of passage debris that encumbered the lower part of the doorway was removed. With trembling hands I made a tiny breach in the upper left-hand corner. And then, widening the hole a little, I inserted the candle and peered in. The hot air escaping from the chamber caused the flame to flicker, but presently details of the room within emerged from the mist. x Can you see anything?

Unfortunately the fourth section stymied the NSA code breakers, as it has continued to do other cryptanalysts for 23 years. The documents noted that “although ideas abound” for deciphering it, the final 97 characters of the sculpture “continue to elude solution.”

In 2010, Sanborn, surprised that the final section had remained unsolved for so long, and perhaps feeling guilty about an error he had made in the sculpture that misled puzzle-solvers for years, decided to disclose six of the 97 letters in the last section. The six letters — NYPVTT — are the 64th through 69th letters of the final section and when deciphered spell out the word “BERLIN.”

“In part of the code that’s been deciphered, I refer to an act that took place when I was at the agency and a location that’s on the ground of the agency,” Sanborn told Wired in 2005. He may be referring to something he buried on the CIA grounds, though he won’t say for sure. The decrypted text gives latitude and longitude coordinates (38 57 6.5 N, 77 8 44 W), which Sanborn has said refer to “locations of the agency.” So sleuths will have to first decipher the code then find their way onto the CIA grounds and locate that place in order to finally discover what it all means

full article click here and to see the website for the sculpture itself click here

The Babushka Lady

While people were pouring over the footage of the assassination of John F. Kennedy in 1963, a mysterious woman was spotted in the film. She was wearing a brown overcoat and a scarf on her head (a “babushka”). She appeared to be holding something in front of her face, like a camera. She appeared many times in the footage and even stayed on the scene after most people left. Shortly after she is seen moving away to the East up Elm Street. The FBI publicly requested that the woman come forward and give them the footage she shot but she never did.

In 1970 a woman named Beverly Oliver came forward, and in interviews with researcher J. Gary Shaw, claimed to have been the Babushka Lady. She was a dancer and singer (although apparently not a stripper) at the Colony Club, a strip joint that competed with Jack Ruby’s Carousel Club. She claims to have spent considerable time in the Carousel Club, and to have known Jack Ruby well. Over the years, her story has been elaborated to include many elements which, if true, imply a conspiracy to murder Kennedy. for her full story click here

For example, a video posted to YouTube in January 2012 by a young Canadian university student near Edmonton, Alberta, contained strange sounds that she asked for help in explaining. The mysterious sounds video went viral, and garnered nearly 2 million views before it was exposed as a prank. In an interview with a local newspaper, she admitted that she made the video “to show my friends and family how easy it was…. and how they shouldn’t believe everything they see online.”